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This tiny cuvée is drawn from 0.1 hectares densely planted at over 10,000 vines/ha by Benjamin’s great-grandmother in 1938. As if that was not enough, 1938 was also the birth year of his grandfather, so this wine holds special significance for Benjamin. Particular to Jura, the plant material is an old mutation of Chardonnay called Melon à Queue Rouge. Melon is the Arboisien name for Chardonnay, while queue rouge refers to the pinky-red tinge the stems take on. Stéphane Tissot believes that at some point in history, Chardonnay vines planted on soils near Arbois slowly mutated into what is now Melon à Queue Rouge. It seems likely that the variety fell out of fashion in the more commercial era of the 1960s due to its small berries and lower yields. Despite its rarity today, you can still find bottlings from Domaine de la Pinte, la Ratte and Julien Aviet, while the now-retired Pope of Arbois, Jacques Puffeney, also produced an iteration. Benjamin explains that while this cuvée resembles the ‘normal’ Viandris Chardonnay, the Melon à Queue Rouge’s “beautiful fruit” ripens with slightly higher sugars and higher acidity than the other Chardonnay vines. He only works the vines of this plot by horse and sprays by hand, so the vines see no tractor. The trellising is also high at 1.8 metres, so they are not trimmed, only ‘tressed’ or wrapped down (literally plaited).
To emphasise the different terroirs of each parcel, the winemaking for all the Chardonnays remains very similar. All the grapes are pressed as whole bunches into used 600-litre barrels for fermentation and 12 months of lees-aging. Benjamin then decants off the gross lees, and the wine rests on clean lees in stainless steel for a further six months, allowing him to bottle the wines without filtration. The 2022 is a brilliant wine: deep, powdery, infinitely complex and long. Well worth hunting down!